In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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Last weekend, I had the time and opportunity to watch two films in two days. Both are based on true life stories, and also based in large part on the personal accounts of the protagonists. Both have been hailed as wonderful films with performances which are Oscar worthy. On the face of it, they did not have […]
In the sixties and seventies, alcohol and tobacco were wrecking havoc on the health of the people, and doctors and policy makers alike were just waking up to the fact that serious health repercussions could result due to these habits/ addictions. It took a long and hard fought battle with the powerful opposing lobby to implement restrictions […]
The great columnist of The Washington Post, Art Buchwald was perhaps, also a clairvoyant man. A tongue-in-cheek piece by him written nearly 30 years ago, in the wake of rising prices in the U.S.A, describes his own foray into grocery shopping with his wife. He has to pass an armed guard, show his I.D. and […]
“Vegetarian!!!” intoned our cousin D, succinctly. “No fish, no chicken, no egg, no meat.” The waiter in the restaurant in Avanos, Turkey, nodded enthusiastically and then…looked blankly at us. Of the three of us, only D was vegetarian, rigidly so in fact and we needed to be sure of what would be served. By now, […]
In the 1998 Hollywood romantic film, You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a classic face-off between the neighbourhood ‘mom-and-pop’ book- store versus a national chain is the back-drop to the story. The struggle of the little shop to stay afloat in trying times and its subsequent failure is probably played out in […]
We turned off the A-82; the first sight of the main village square of Scottish village of Drumnadrochit with a pub, restaurant, grocery shop and newsagent, straight out of an Enid Blyton story. Flowers bloomed everywhere; colorful petunias peered out of hanging baskets on […]
One of the perks of aging was that I could give up my looks as a lost cause and save a lot of time and money that would be spent primping in front of the mirror. The hair-style, style of clothes and so forth, that suit me are now practically set in stone and […]
I always wondered what would be like to be a boy and to be in a world, where the freedom and choices seemed to be limitless. Where the deadline-free timings left one free to do whatever one wished at all kinds of crazy hours. Where the clothes one wore or […]
Fireworks were exploding over Sultanahmet square in Istanbul, as we strolled back after dinner. It was our last night in Turkey, a country that had thrown quite a few surprises our way, all of them pleasant. The term Turkish delight could be applied to more […]
Standing in the checkout-line at a supermarket, I saw an ad for a weight-loss clinic go up on screen. It started with ”Ladies, do you HATE looking at yourself in the mirror? Do you want to be a page three yummy-mummy?” in bold letters with a blaring commentary to match. This was […]
It was a hectic morning as always. Driving for a full 10 minutes in rush hour Mumbai traffic and successfully crossing the grid-locked Khodadad circle, I was ascending the Tilak bridge at a crawl. Looking out of my window, I saw this beautiful and tall bougainvillea vine that had crawled on the top of a […]